Punctum Books

Chapter Title: Rethinking the 1960s: The History of Art History

Chapter Author(s): Bruce Robertson

Book Title: Complementary Modernisms in China and the United States

Book Subtitle: Art as Life/Art as Idea
Book Editor(s): 张謇, 布鲁斯·罗伯逊, Zhang Jian, Robertson Bruce
Published by: Punctum Books. (2020)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv16zk03m.33

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 Rethinking the 1960s: The History of Art History
Bruce Robertson

The foundational narratives of modernism, as seen from an American perspec-

tive, are called into question when aligned with the interests of Chinese art histo-
rians. As we have seen, the divide between “modernism” and “post-modernism,”
which for Americanists occurred somewhere in the 1960s, for Chinese audiences
has little relevance. In this traditional story, both China and the United States
are in the same relationship to modernism for the first half of the century, both
being acted upon rather than originating styles and ideas when they first engage
with modernist art. Then for the second part of the century, China is in a belated
position in relationship to the United States, until just the last two decades. But
by this point in the 21st century, this is an uninteresting and unproductive story,
one that we can resist and make more complex.
In the United States, for example, art historians for the last generation have
been looking at nativist roots for modernism: recognizing, for example, that
Pollock’s vision has roots in the large-scale landscape paintings of the 19th cen-
tury, like Frederick Church’s Niagara. Or finding the roots of abstraction in the
teaching of Alfred Wesley Dow, or some of the work of John Twatchman, in a
lineage that extends from James McNeil Whistler.1 The worldwide reactions to
late capitalism must lead us to a recognition of many modernisms, internally
within the United States and externally as well. As one example we may consider
a group of three paintings created in San Francisco in the same month in 1926,
portraits by Miki Hayakawa of an African-American man, a portrait by Yun
Gee of Hayakawa painting that sitter, and a portrait of Yun Gee by their teach-
er Otis Oldfield.2 Miki Hayakawa (1899–1959) and Yun Gee (1906–1963) were
classmates at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. She had been
born in Hokkaido, Japan, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 9;
he had been born in Kaiping, China, and immigrated at the age of 15 to join his
father (who had legal status in the United States) in San Francisco. Otis Oldfield
(1890–1969), who had trained in Paris, was their teacher. In this one moment,
then, may be found a portrait of an African-American man by a Japanese-Amer-
ican woman, a portrait of Japanese-American woman by a Chinese-American
man, and finally a portrait of a Chinese-American man by an Anglo-American
man, cumulatively painted in a contemporary modern French manner adapted

1 See Ellen Johnson, Modern Art and the Object (New York: Thames and Hudson,
1976) and Barbara Haskell, Georgia O’Keeffe and Abstraction (New York: Whit-
ney Museum and Yale University Press, 2009).
2 See Woollin Kim, Jinmyung Kim, and Songhyuk Yang, eds. Art Across America.
(Seoul: National Museum of Korea, 2013), 287. 435

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 rethinking the 1960s

to local circumstances which easily cross conventional boundaries of style, race,

and gender.3

The rest of this chapter proceeds by offering a cautionary tale about the ways in
which art history itself distorts the history we need to discover, which lies within
territory most American art historians would no longer consider “modern.” I
examine how the terms we use disguise and even hide the objects we look at, and
ask us to consider what it means to do art history without the art history that has
shaped the canonical history of modernism we all know. That is to say, to create
a new art history that enlarges our sense of what modernism is.
For strategic reasons, I set this tale within the single most studied decade of
the last century, the 1960s, which has produced an art-historical literature in just
the last quarter century almost as large as the literature on the Italian Renais-
sance. But much of what I say could be said of any art historical period.
What makes the 1960s so important is that it embodies a paradigm shift,
where the actions by artists of that decade map out the territory explored in the
American art world ever since. The terms of this revolution may be listed as:

1. an expansion of the media used by artists: performance, installation, and

mixed media proliferate.
2. a valuation and validation of mass media.
3. the dominance of conceptual art and a proliferation of words—by critics,
artists, and art historians.
4. the emergence of identity politics and art.
5. the ascendancy of the commercial art world (and attendant art institutions)
on a new, vast scale.

We deal with this complexity and simultaneity of developments by using the

short hand of movements and names: Happenings, Pop, Minimalism, Fluxus,
and so on. But these terms, while useful, obscure as much as they reveal. Let me
focus on just one—Minimalism—to examine this problem, and question its
usefulness to us as art historians.
Minimalism in most general accounts is seen as the apex of modernism—a
final clarity about abstraction and the nature and use of materials and forms
within the mediums of painting and sculpture, in terms that Clement Greenberg
would have used. But just as frequently in recent years, it has been seen as funda-
mentally post-modern, allied with Pop in the rejection of affect and individuali-
ty, and arising at the same time and out of the same circumstances and with the
same genealogy.4 Obviously, however, it cannot be both: that is the first problem,

3 See LACMA’s online collections (https://collections.lacma.org/) and also ShiPu

Wang, The Other American Moderns: Matsura, Ishigaki, Noda, Hayakawa (Penn-
sylvania State University Press, 2017), figs. 59, 62 and 63.
4 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture (New York: Viking, 1977);
436 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 12–23;

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robertson

and it is shared by other work produced in the 1960s to a degree that calls into
question the value of both terms—modernism and post-modernism—as having
any critical value.
One of the reasons why Minimalism has attracted such attention is that it was
defended and criticized by the best critics of the day, such as Rosalind Krauss,
Barbara Rose, Michael Fried, and others in a dialogue shaped as much by the
artists’ own writings, especially Robert Morris and Donald Judd.5 A number of
these artists were also trained as art historians, again particularly Robert Morris,
who did a master’s thesis on Brancusi. In other words, we should take seriously
what these artists have to say about their own production, a point I will come
back to. Second, it is a label that almost immediately taken up in adjacent fields.
The choreographer Yvonne Rainer applied it to dance in 1966, and the composer
Michael Nyman to music in 1968.6 Thus it is a term that had wide, immediate,
and useful currency across the arts.
At the same time, it was one that was denied by all its major figures in the
visual arts, who also rejected that they had much to do with each other. Donald
Judd furiously resisted the term: he preferred “specific objects,” and explicitly
said “the new three-dimensional work doesn’t constitute a movement, school or
style. The differences are greater than the similarities. The similarities are selected
from the work; they aren’t a movement’s first principles or delimiting rules.”7
And in the 1964 essay entitled “Specific Objects,” he includes a wide range of
artists whom we would not call Minimalist today, such as Jasper Johns, Lucas
Samaras, Yayoi Kasuma, and Claes Oldenburg.8 Robert Morris, in his influen-
tial essay “Notes on Sculpture” in 1966, never uses the word “minimalism” and
instead applies the term “literal” to his own work.9 Sol Lewitt claimed in 1967
that no artist identified with the term claimed to know anything about it and
certainly hadn’t agreed to be labeled as such.10

Barbara Rose, “ABC Art,” Art in America 53, no. 5 (October–November 1965):
57–69, reprinted in Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock,
(New York: Dutton: 1968), 290.
5 See Donald Judd, Complete Writings, 1959–1975 (Eindhoven, the Netherlands:
Van Abbemuseum, 1987), 197ff; and Robert Morris “Notes on Sculpture. Part I
and Part II,” in Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock (New
York: E.P. Dutton, 1968), 222–35.
6 Yvonner Rainer, “A Quasi Survey of Some ‘Minimalist’ Tendencies in the Quan-
titatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A,”
Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory Battcock, 263–73; Richard Koste-
lanetz and R. Fleming, Writings on Glass: Essays, Interviews, Criticism (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 114–16.
7 Donald Judd, “Specific Objects,” reprinted in Judd, Complete Writings, 181.
8 Ibid., 181–89.
9 “Notes on Sculpture. Part 1,” in Minimal Art, A Critical Anthology, ed. Gregory
Battcock, 224.
10 See also Sol Lewitt’s comments in “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art,” Artforum 5,
no. 10 (Summer 1967): 80: “No artist I know will own up to any part of this,” 437

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 rethinking the 1960s

The first exhibitions that try to deal with Minimalism are equally heteroge-
neous. “Black White and Gray,” organized by Sam Wagstaff at the Wadsworth
Atheneum in 1964, included Jim Dine and Andy Warhol along with Morris.
“Primary Structures,” organized at the Jewish Museum by Kynaston MacShine
in 1966, included Anthony Caro and other painted sculpture, along with Morris
and Judd.
Judd’s inclusion of Oldenburg’s Switches in his analysis of contemporary
sculpture indicates that he was looking at other things than simple, geometrical
form as a defining characteristic. During the run of “Primary Structures,” he
came under intense attack for arguing that the hand of the artist was irrelevant
and that the fact that his work was fabricated by industrial specialist fabricators
made no difference to its authenticity as art.11 This emphasis on industrial tech-
niques prompted many critics to ally his work with the commercial techniques
used by Warhol. And there doesn’t seem to be much difference in form or tech-
nique between a stack of boxes by Warhol and one by Judd.
The articles by Judd and Morris belong to a very particular art world context,
one that was both commercially and critically defined, and extremely compet-
itive. “Pop” by 1963 had had successful exhibitions by dealers and museums on
both coasts: many New York dealers were looking for the next big thing and
Minimalism was a favorite choice. Leo Castelli, who had been the first to ex-
hibit Johns and Rauschenberg, signed up both Judd and Morris in 1965 when
their previous gallery folded.12 The first major museum exhibitions devoted to
Minimalism were held in 1964 and 1966, as noted above. The seminal articles on
Minimalism are those by Barbara Rose, “ABC Art” published in 1965, and Mi-
chael Fried’s “Art and Objecthood” published in 1967.13 Rose’s article attempted
to define the movement while Fried’s article attacked it furiously for being inher-
ently theatrical. Fried’s article provoked an equally strong reaction: many critics
felt Fried had erred grievously by focusing on Morris to the exclusion of Judd, a
result, they felt, of his fundamental error in moving away from New York. Fried
was no longer in the know, no longer had his finger on the real pulse of the New
York art world.14 The particular issue of ArtForum that Fried’s essay appeared in,
also included essays by Morris on sculpture and Sol Lewitt’s essay on conceptual
art. In other words, this was a largely family squabble turned universal because
of the peculiar power of New York City art world institutions. New Yorkers
think they speak for the world, and these critics felt that the rest of the world

meaning Minimalism.
11 See Mark di Suvero, Donald Judd, Kynaston McShine, Robert Morris, Barbara
Rose, “Symposium on The New Sculpture,”New York, May 2, 1966, in James
Meyer, Minimalism (London, New York: Phaidon, 2002), 220–22.
12 See Anne Cohen Solel, Leo Castelli and His Circle (New York: Alfred E. Knopf,
2010).
13 Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” Artforum 5, no. 10 (Summer 1967): 12–23.
14 See Philip Leider’s comments in Amy Newman, Challenging Art: Artforum
438 1962–1974 (New York: Soho, 2000), 198.

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robertson

Fig. 1. Robert Morris, Column, 1961. Photograph courtesy

of Castelli Gallery, New York. © 2020 The Estate of Rob-
ert Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York

was irrelevant—and they have been successful

in pushing that point of view because of the
strategic and cultural power of the USA.
Moreover, Minimalism was one of a vari-
ety of terms used around 1964 to 1966 to de-
scribe what we call Minimalism today. “ABC
art” was the term used by Barbara Rose in the
first general article on the movement. “Lit-
eralism” was equally in play.15 Each term di-
rects one’s attention to different aspects of the
work. “ABC art” suggests the basic building
blocks of language and comprehension of the
world. “Minimalism” invites us to inspect the
visible formal aspects, as though the essential
point is to carve away any excess of form to
get to an irreducible core of meaning. “Literalism” points in another direction,
to a one-to-one mapping of the object against some perceived reality. Morris’s
1961 work Column, for example, as a Minimalist object is a platonic ideal form;
as a Literalist one it is a gray plywood box of a certain dimension (Fig. 1).
Finally, the minute Minimalism was canonized as a certified category or
art movement, younger artists reacted against it. Mel Bochner confidently saw
himself, Richard Serra, Eva Hesse, and others as post-Minimalist by 1966, the
year that “Primary Structures” established Minimalism publicly. In other words,
Minimalism was over before it had been named.16
To examine the limits of usefulness of Minimalism, and its associated mean-
ings, let me focus even more closely, on just one object, Robert Morris’s Column
of 1961, arguably the first and most iconic large-scale Minimal sculpture, what
the Guggenheim Museum curator Jeffrey Weiss calls: “Morris’s first, now legend-
ary ‘large form’ work.”17 It is, or was, constructed out of two sheets of plywood, 4
by 8 feet, each cut in half lengthwise, assembled and painted light grey.
Generally, Column is read in terms of either Gestalt psychology or phenom-
enology: that is to say, it is apprehended as a whole; it exerts a presence that is
equivalent to a bodily presence and exists in our space and acts on us. As Morris
wrote five years later: “The better contemporary sculpture takes relationships out

15 See James Meyer, Minimalism: Art and Polemics in the Sixties (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2001), 3.
16 Mel Bochner quoted in Newman, Challenging Art, 261.
17 Jeffrey Weiss, “Eternal Return: Jeffrey Weiss on Robert Morris’s Recent Work,”
Artforum International 52, no. 6 (February 2014): 176. 439

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 rethinking the 1960s

of the work and makes them a function of space, light and the viewer’s field of
vision […]. One’s awareness of oneself existing in the same space as the work
is stronger […]. One is more aware than before that he himself is establishing
relationships as he apprehends the object from various positions, etc.”18 In other
words, Morris rejects the individual or emotional excesses of Abstract Expres-
sionism, or even the affectlessness of Pop, and places meaning in real, kinesthetic
or physiological responses. “The sculptural facts of space, light and materials
have always functioned concretely and literally,” Morris claims.19
But Column began its material, phenomenological presence not as a sculp-
ture but as a dance prop, built by another sculptor, George Sugarman. Sugarman
built it and painted it bright yellow, for the choreographer Yvonne Rainer’s first
dance concert in June 1961, a short dance, just 8 minutes long, called The Bells,
in an evening of dances organized by the choreographer James Waring.20 After
the evening was over, the prop was hauled backstage at the Living Theater, where
Morris claimed it and took it back to the studio space he shared with his wife,
Simone Forti, and Yvonne Rainer: the two dancers had the large room and he
had a small room with a 7-foot ceiling. Rainer, when she performed The Bells
again (just two more times) did not use the prop—she never really understood
why Sugarman insisted on building it for her in any case. And then the dance
dropped out of her repertoire, and survives only in one or two photographs and
a dance score.
Morris’s Column has a conditional physical and documentary existence not
so different from The Bells. He deployed Column in a performance, also staged
for Waring at the Living Theatre, on February 8, 1962, as part of a program to
raise funds for the publication of La Monte Young’s An Anthology of Chance Op-
erations. Waring gave each of the participants seven minutes and Morris’s plan
was to stand inside the column for three and a half minutes and then push it
over, with himself in it, and let it lie there for another three and a half minutes
until the curtain closed. On the day of the performance, Morris rehearsed it for
the first time in the morning, splitting the skin on his forehead open when he
hit an internal brace. Returning to the studio about five hours later after visiting
the emergency room, he hammered a short nail at the top, attached a string to
it, and during the performance, standing safely out of sight in the wings, pulled
it over.21
Like Duchamp’s Fountain, Morris’s Column is a found object that is appro-
priated, signed, and re-presented through a different orientation and context.
Unlike Fountain, however, Column did not begin existence as an anonymous,

18 Morris, ‘Notes on Sculpture. Part II,” 232.

19 Ibid.
20 Yvonne Rainer, Feelings are Facts: A Life (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 235. The
existence of the prop is confirmed by Rainer’s comments in “Notes on Deborah
Hay,” Ikon (February 1967): 2–3.
21 Robert Morris’s interview with Paul Cummings gives the full details. Oral histo-
440 ry interview with Robert Morris, March 10, 1968. Archives of American Art.

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robertson

industrial object, but as a prop by another sculptor, George Sugarman, a sculptor

who the year before had pioneered the creation of large-scale sculpture that sat
on the floor without a pedestal. We can see Column then, perhaps, as a collab-
oration among three artists: Sugarman, Rainer, and Morris. Remembering Col-
umn’s origins in two performances, we should remind ourselves of the fact that
the original object was constructed to stand on a stage, with a dancer in front of
it and much the same size as the dancer, and to mediate the space between the
dancer and the architectural frame around her, while activating the visual field
with a little lively color. Morris’s appropriation of the object for his performance
relies on this knowledge—the perfection of its size to house his living body, now
inside the piece instead of outside, static instead of moving, and transferring the
action of his body to the movement of the sculpture (which was accomplished,
even when he was reduced to pulling it over, by jerking his hand to produce the
action of the column). Morris’s performance can be seen as a negation of Rain-
er’s, a male performance inside the column (“the transcendental phallic signifier
triumphant” he ironically calls it later) instead of a female performance dancing
around it.22 He says of his early pieces that he needed “to make something that
had a scale necessary for the body to encounter”; i.e., that a phenomenological
element was crucial.23 In this case, the body encountered is both outside (Rainer)
and inside (Morris) the object. We should read it not just as a grey column but
also an anti-yellow column, not just as a sculpture, and not just a stage prop, but
a performer in its own right.
The actuality of Column’s presence and the conceptual clarity and richness of
Morris’s performance during Waring’s benefit evening, which are self-evident to
us over fifty years later, were in fact a very mixed bag of intentions and meanings:
among the audience were those who thought they knew Morris was in the col-
umn, those who knew he wasn’t, and those who didn’t know either way. And for
all the retrospective theorizing about the meaning of Column, it is curious that
Morris put so little thought into how wedging his body at an angle into the box
might have awkward physical consequences. Nor should one forget the humor-
ous aspect. I bet it got a big laugh and a squeal or two of surprise when it toppled
over with a bang on stage, after standing there doing nothing for three-and-a-
half interminable minutes. The “phallic signifier” had deflated. Did anyone won-
der what would happen next: would it crawl off-stage? So the prop becomes an
actor, the ugly duckling becomes a swan. It’s not so much that the column turns
into a person; it’s still a column but now it’s an acting column, a talking dog.
It goes from background, a thing on the stage, into our lives where accidents
happen and things fall over. It falls into the realm of the real, in a different sense
from the phenomenological “realness” of Minimalism. Since Column is only

22 Robert Morris, Have I Reasons: Work and Writings 1993–2007 (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008), 89.
23 Benjamin Buchloh, “Conversation with Robert Morris,” October 70 “Three
Conversations in 1985: Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris” (Au-
tumn 1994): 51. 441

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 rethinking the 1960s

Fig. 2. Simone Forti, Slant Board,

1961, performed at the Art, De-
sign & Architecture Museum, UC
Santa Barbara, with Forti observ-
ing, 2017. © 2019 The Museum of
Modern Art, New York.

intermittently mate-
rial, its real existence
is both performative
(and hence transitory)
and conceptual (and
thus, seldom phenom-
enological), and it is
called into repeat per-
formances through the
forces of market and reputation, on view always only in temporary situations.
In fact there are three more players involved in the creation of Column. Two
I have mentioned already, Simone Forti, Morris’s wife, and La Monte Young, a
composer from the Bay Area who was actively connected to John Cage and to
the musicians and artists who were part of Fluxus. Young had curated a series of
evening concerts in Yoko Ono’s loft in the spring of 1961, where Simone Forti
had presented her second dance concert. One of the most famous of these dance
constructions is Slantboard, two sheets of plywood 4 × 8 feet, angled against
the wall, with five ropes tied to it along the top (Fig. 2). The performers work
up and down and across for 10 minutes or so. The structure was made by her
husband, Morris, who also made several other structures, including two boxes
under which the performers lay and whistled to each other. These forms resonat-
ed throughout Morris’s career, an influence he has made handsome tribute to.
La Monte Young also prompted a work from Morris, a conceptual piece for his
Fluxus Anthology of Change Operations, entitled “Blank Form”: “A column with
perfectly smooth, rectangular surfaces, 2 feet by 2 feet by 8 feet, painted gray.”24
This would have constituted the second public appearance of Column, if Morris
had not withdrawn the piece from the publication.
The last player involved is Walter de Maria, who had known Morris and Forti
in San Francisco before moving to New York in 1960, just a few months after
they arrived. He had begun building boxes in California, mostly small but a few
were larger, and continued to build more after coming to New York. He and
Morris and Forti saw each other practically every day for the first year or two,
before Morris and Forti divorced in early 1962, and de Maria realized that he and
Morris were now, in his words, “competitive rather than collaborative.”25 He also

24 Morris withdrew the piece from An Anthology of Chance Operations, and it was
not published until much later.
442 25 Oral history interview with Walter De Maria, October 4, 1972, Archives of

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robertson

contributed a piece to La Monte Young’s Anthology, dated February 1961 (that is,
well before Sugarman had built the prop for Rainer): “I have built a box eight
feet high. On top place a small gold ball. Of course no one will be able to see the
ball sitting up there on the box. I will just know it’s there.” He exhibited a few
of his boxes, and perhaps this one, in July 1961, just before Rainer’s performance
of The Bells. So the first 8-foot tall plywood rectangular sculpture Morris saw was
de Maria’s. Thus, to sum up the circumstances of Column’s birth, three sculptors,
two choreographers, and one composer were involved, in venues as diverse as
the Living Theater and a Fluxus performance. The impure state of the original
(or actually, the second physical manifestation of the) object was implicitly ac-
knowledged by Donald Judd. He recalled seeing it in the 1963 group show and
disliking it so much, he and Lucas Samaras shoved it around the room to get it
out of the way.26 Perhaps he was one of the people who knew that Morris was
supposed to have been inside it in the first instance?
A year after Morris’s performance outside the column, Column reappeared
in the first exhibition of his large-scale plywood sculptures at a group show
at Green Gallery in January 1963. It appeared again in Sam Wagstaff’s “Black,
White and Gray” exhibition at the Wadsworth Athenaeum in January 1964, and
was constructed in the gallery by Morris. By the end of 1965, Morris’s large
plywood pieces were being fabricated in fiberglass molded over plywood cores,
so that in the 1965 exhibition at Green Gallery, the forms are composed of gray
fiberglass. When Column appeared in his 1969 Corcoran show, it was still in a
painted plywood version, however, and was constructed in the gallery, almost
certainly by the museum’s own carpenters.
By 1973 Column was paired with another column, this one lying down, recre-
ating the two positions of the column in the initial performance, thus implying
the motion in between. Morris later suggested that the “action” of Column was
implicit or inspired by its position in his seven-foot ceiling studio: it lay on its
side and he couldn’t set it upright.27 This version of Columns (henceforth they
would always be paired) appeared in an edition fabricated in aluminum. Morris
recounts that he himself made the early plywood pieces whenever needed; and
that if a museum or gallery “in Milwaukee say” wanted to exhibit any of them,
he just got them to fabricate them and paint them the usual gray. Morris has
explained that the gray-painted plywood boxes from 1964 “were competently
made but not expertly made.” It was easier for him to construct them for exhi-
bitions and toss out afterward than to build permanent works. “I said at some
point there are no originals of these […]. There are only reproductions. Nobody
[back then] wanted to hear that.”28 One time he sent assembly instructions for

American Art.
26 Donald Judd, interview by Lucy Lippard, April 10, 1968, Lucy Lippard Papers,
Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
27 Wade Guyton, “Robert Morris,” Interview, January 6, 2014, 3, http://www.
interviewmagazine.com/art/robert-morris.
28 Robert Morris, interview with Jeffrey Weiss and Julia Robinson, New York Pub- 443

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 rethinking the 1960s

the pieces to a museum, whose workers “built them too well—and that offend-
ed me. If you make these things too well, they look like God made them.” So
Column, or its sibling Columns, was made and destroyed a number of times
around the world, and not just in Morris’s studio, before being immortalized
in aluminum. One set of Columns is in the collection of the Tehran Museum of
Contemporary Art, in aluminum, acquired in the late 1970s; another, in painted
plywood, was acquired in 2006 by the Museum Abteiberg in Mönchengladbach,
in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.
The canonization of Column starts with Rosalind Krauss’s game-changing
1977 monograph, Passages in Modern Sculpture, having been included (and re-
produced in the catalogue but not discussed) by Annette Michelson in Morris’s
first major retrospective at the Corcoran in 1970). Krauss begins her discussion
of “theatricality,” a stringent analysis of Michael Fried’s attack on Minimalism,
with a description of the first appearance of Column in 1961, which she uses as
the linchpin of her discussion of the sculptural involvement in theater, hap-
penings, and kinetic art. Returning to Column at the end of the chapter, she
introduces the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty as an analytical tool.29 This
discussion sets the terms for most of the critical literature about both Morris and
Minimalism for decades.
Putatively, in this art history, as a large-scale Minimal sculpture, Column is a
stable material object, one that produces its principal, phenomenological effect
by interacting with the viewer’s experience of the space in which it sits. That is
what Minimal sculptures are. But in actuality, Column is many objects, most of
which don’t exist anymore or exist in states that make them unviewable: mostly
in museum basements, with the most inaccessible probably being the basement
of the Tehran Museum (over forty years by now). How they are actually experi-
enced and talked about is on the basis of photographs. The art historian Amelia
Jones makes the point that she doesn’t have to see Morris’s original Minimalist
sculpture to be able to write about it: for her, and for most commentators, it
exists only as a photograph (and the texts written about them), not so different
from The Bells, the ephemeral dance that inspired its initial creation.30 Morris has
acknowledged exactly this issue: “To view the work in these [semiotic] terms we
do not, needless to say, need the art. A few old photographs will do together with
a few of your own old notations.” 31
What are we to make of Morris’s purpose and intention when he recreates the
piece as he does immediately? In all of the works first appearances, it is literally a
new work, created for that occasion. The dimensions, construction and color re-
main the same, but the actual piece is new. Morris himself agreed that these first

lic Library, April 16, 2014, https://www.nypl.org/audiovideo/object-sculpture-

1960-1965-robert-morris-julia-robinson-jeffrey-weiss-artist-dialogue.
29 Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, 201–3, 236–39.
30 Amelia Jones, Performing the Body/Performing the Text (London and New York:
Routledge, 1999), 47.
444 31 Morris, Have I Reasons, 87.

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robertson

Fig. 3. Robert Morris, Box for Standing, 1961.

Photograph courtesy of Castelli Gallery,
New York. © 2020 The Estate of Robert
Morris / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New
York

large-scale pieces were conceptu-

al. So they are both immaterial
and material, both conceptual
and phenomenological—two
terms at war with each other.
Moreover, how do we under-
stand our experience of Column
when Morris recreates Box for
Standing in walnut, as well as
creating new Columns (Serrated,
Twist, and Spiral), by hiring a
professional fine carpenter, Josh Finn, for an exhibition at Sonnabend Gallery
in 2013? We are certainly not reacting innocently, in the same way as a viewer
in 1962. Yvonne Rainer remembers early Minimalist sculpture as humorous, as
close to Dada, and regrets that the humor has been drained out of the work as
it has become part of the art history canon.32 For early viewers like her, Col-
umn’s first appearance, as I have suggested, must have provoked both alarm and
laughter. The piece that Morris has always tied to Column as his first two mature
works, Box with the Sound of its own Making, is even more explicitly Dadaist:
this is a box that contains a tape of the sounds made during the three hours or
more that it took Morris to make it. The history of this work, despite the fact
that it has existed in a stable material form (putatively) from 1961, has its own
complications: the technology of recording has changed so much (first being
miniaturized and then digitized) that it is hard to say that what we hear today is
what was heard when the work was first created. To ignore these complications
is both to be gullible and willfully blind to the ways in which works of art evolve
and degrade over time.
Morris always has had a tendency to irony, and a savage desire to dismantle
the pieties of the art world, even as he partakes of it; the most recent version of
Column addresses the world of art history explicitly (as Morris has done in a
series of performances as early as 1964), exhibited along with other sculpture/
prop/performance pieces, such as Box for Standing, a work from 1961 (Fig. 3).
When a viewer encounters this Box or Column, they are not experiencing it phe-
nomenologically—in some universal, transhistorical bodily response. It is not
a minimal object but a Minimalist object; we don’t react to it, we recognize it.
And we recognize it through the apparatus of art history. In other words, these

32 Yvonne Rainer, interview by Connie Butler, New York, July 7, 2011, Museum of
Modern Art Oral History Program Archives, New York. 445

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 rethinking the 1960s

recent recreations, in Morris’s sly fashion, are conceptual works that address the
intersection of academic art history and the art market: they belong to the same
“style” of art that Jeff Koons’s work does, not Minimalist sculpture.
The real job of art history today, then, is not to certify Column’s Minimalist
credentials, but to attempt to deconstruct our art historical recognition of it. We
cannot go back, of course, but we can recreate the context of the work’s creation
and reception, before it became Minimalism. To do anything else is to make us
merely agents of art history, rather than art historians.
And in one last complication, we might consider work by Francesco Lo
Savio, exhibited in Rome in 1960—before Morris had made a single sculpture
and was still considering becoming an art historian.33 It is now celebrated as a
European precursor to Minimalism, for the obvious reason to claim European
priority for the movement. Is there a reason not to call it Minimalist? The two
obvious reasons have nothing to do with the object in its material existence. The
first is that for Lo Savio, the piece existed within a discourse on architecture
and the Baroque. The second belongs the point I have been making throughout
this paper: Minimalism is a retroactive construction of critics and art historians,
which can be both helpful and unhelpful for us today.
In conclusion then, if we can look past received art historical narratives, and
abandon the easy shorthand of art historical terms, we discover exciting and in-
teresting harmonies and dissonances between the modernisms of China and the
United States, as both nations grapple with the changing conditions of existence
and the dramas of history during the last century. The relationship between Pol-
lock and Wu Guanzhong is not just between American Abstract Expressionism
and a Chinese modernist, but ultimately between two artists and two art works.

33 Germano Celant, ed., Spazio e Luce/Francesco Lo Savio (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1975).

For a recent exhibition of these works see Casoli de Luca: https://www.casolidelu-
ca.com/en/rome/passate/francesco-lo-savio/. The connections between American
and Italian artists in the 1950s and early 1960s were profound and rich: one can
consider the effect Italy had on Cy Twombly and Robert Rauschenberg, on the
446 one hand, and Lucio Fontana’s presence in New York from 1958 onwards.

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